At Night All Blood is Black
Ratings31
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings31
Average rating3.7
Selected by students across France to win the the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.
Reviews with the most likes.
I am mesmerized that so many themes can be explored in under 100 pages (the version I read had 83). The main themes of this book are (in my opinion): war, savagery, and duality, the last one being the most important and prominent throughout the story. So much so that the other themes can be included under duality.
I'll continue with my interpretation of the mind-boggling ending:
After Mademba's death, Alfa is left completely traumatized. For him, Mademba was goodness personified, he was his more-than-brother. As a way to cope with his best friend's death and the guilt for not ending his life when begged three times, he slowly allows Mademba into his mind. That's why he “starts to think for himself”. By doing so, he's letting him live on through himself.
As the book progresses, we learn more about Alfa through flash-backs narrated in the first person. We are then able to understand the importance Mademba has for Alfa. One of the things he points out in one of the flashbacks is that Mademba died a virgin, while Alfa did not (duality). Alfa had sex with Fary. Both boys had set their eyes on her, but she chose Alfa in the end. He felt guilty about this too. He felt like he had robbed his best friend of having that experience and making him die a boy, rather than a man.
In the passage about Mademoiselle François, we get two points of view. The first is Mademba's and the second is Alfa's (both POVs are told from Alfa's body). I interpret that from Mademba's POV that encounter is consensual. It was that experience that made him fully flesh out inside Alfa's head. In the other POV, Alfa forces himself on her. He's aware Mademba is within him and wants him to have the experience he never got to have.
What I still haven't fully figured out is the story of the Princess and the Lion-sorcerer.
All in all, I truly recommend this book. It is beautifully written and the story's captivating from page one.
Det er all grunn til å lese denne boken og til å tro på alt skrytet denne internasjonale booker-prisvinneren har fått. Poetisk krigslitteratur suggererende brutalt ble nesten for mye, men så skjer det noe rundt side 70 som du bare må lese.
Trigger warning: fuckin' everything. As in, if you're the kind of person who needs trigger warnings, this is not a book for you. Even if you aren't, you may want to be in a mental safe space before reading this: it's pretty devastating.
The violence of the war is bad enough, but what really got to me was the emotional violence that the protagonist endures: unimaginable loneliness, guilt, compounded with tragic losses... and absolutely no way to communicate. He internalizes it all, to the point of inventing complete conversations and relationships with the people around him, ending up lost in a world of his own imagining. The book is narrated first person, so all we have is his perspective, and the author handles the sanity death spiral masterfully.
Edition note: the narrator's language is quite lovely, a syncopated voice that I think would be especially effective in audiobook.
